Traffic deaths have climbed over the past few years so much that casualties were 18% higher for the first nine months of 2021 than in 2019.
The United States just passed 900,000 COVID deaths — and we can add another 8,935 souls to that grim total.
That’s the number of “extra” people who perished in car crashes in 2020 and 2021, with traffic deaths soaring during the pandemic. It’s not because people have more room to drive fast on emptier roads. It’s yet another example of the same anti-social behavior that’s pushed up the murder rate.
In early 2020, reporters and researchers told us that fewer crashes would be one of the pandemic’s “silver linings,” like more time to work on our hobbies.
And it was true, for a while: During spring 2020, traffic deaths fell from 9,172 the previous spring to 9,120 — a grand total decline of 0.6%.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post